But the clock in my head was temporarily switched off. I was disconcerted to find that when it was time to go home, it was already late afternoon.
I remember the strange slow-motion appearance of things. I could see bits of what was happening, but was totally powerless to react.
One of the concepts of Relativity is that all Observers have their own clocks and those clocks are right for them. This set me thinking that this scenario is further complicated by the perceptions of the Observer. If the Observers clock is wrong, he/she will never know unless a related cross-observational time event occurs. Y2k is one such event. Because it is fixed.
Some people live in a Y2k aware world and time is of great importance, there is a race against the clock. Others, inhabiting a similar and overlapping universe, are not Y2k aware and meander about playing golf and generally enjoying themselves as if nothing were going to happen. Rarely do these worlds collide. Until the Day.
This all leads up to a new Y2k phenomenon, christened "Time Dilation", which is causing our Netizens to scurry about and confer in dark corners. Somebody found that the clock on an old 286 speeded up considerably when booted with a system date after 1999-12-31.
Now the reasons for why this happens are various. Some BIOS have been found which now execute an erronneous code path and set the RTC registers incorrectly, putting it into a "fast" mode.
The other scenario occurs because of overdriving the CPU clock. For example a 99MHZ 486 actually has a bus speed of 33MHZ but the internal CPU bus is overdriven to 99-odd MHZ, speeding up instruction processing. The original implementation of this method was called "Blue" something. If the RTC takes its time from the internal CPU strobe then it will run three times faster.
Which gives us a dilemma. We Know that this is a rare thing. Improbable in fact. But we now have to go through an additional testing phase. All of which steals valuable resource from fixing "known" problems and wasting time with arcane "might happen but probably never will" things of this sort. Yet another reason for being late for the inflexible deadline.
Miss Priscilla, our large and portly female Pig, got "married" recently and was borne off in state to The Boar on a nearby farm. We gather she then said "You want to do What?" and promptly Sat Down when approached amorously by said Boar.
After towing two farm workers around on a rope in ever increasing circles, and generally avoiding clambering into the 4x4, She was then brought back in dark disgrace.
This is a pity, for The Boss requires productivity from all the members of our little enclave. (I must admit I get tremors when I see her beady eye upon me while I am woffling about Y2k). So Priscilla will not be with us for much longer. If we do not produce Piglets we must produce Meat.
So until the fateful day, She and I gaze at each other soulfully over the wall of her sty when I come to feed her her corn ("mielies" in the local vernacular), and she munches away. The mielies cause an alarming foaming at the mouth (excess salivation), but one gets used to it. And Pigs seem to enjoy it.
They are on mielies, an expensive diet, because the students ("Rhodents") have finished their exams and rocked off to enjoy their summer vacation. (Southern Hemisphere and all that). So swill buckets laden with uneaten student food no longer grace the Porcine table.
So as we observe each other, I in my Y2k universe, and she in her non-Y2k universe, I mull over the fact that small indiscretions can lead to life threatening situations. Ignore or trifle with Y2k and it will come back to haunt (or even kill) you.
Which reminds me of a meeting of the local chapter of APICS (SAPICS-PE) where I gave my little talk and listened to an excellent presentation given by one of our major Motor Manufacturers on their Y2k project. The only sour note was when they were describing their rationale for selecting "partners" in their Y2k efforts. "Proven track-record" and "Reference to other successful completions".
Don't you just hate those people who interrrupt the speaker and ask questions and delay you from getting at the grog waiting for you at the end of the session?
Well I am one of those. So I chirped "just remember that anyone who calls themselves a Y2k expert will lie to you about other things as well" and "if anyone claims they have 'completed' a Y2k project, ask them if it was successful". Well we won't know until the year after next, will we. I particularly like the stories of people who have "successfully" implemented Y2k on pre-ESA machinery. So much for the theory of "Best Practice" as applied to Y2k.
I was delighted to find a little Access wriggle today. I am building this Web page to display a Parts Catalog and take orders using MS NT 4 and MS DbWeb 1.1. Now the schema for DbWeb is Access 2 and you destroy it if you fiddle with it under Access 97, so I was running 3.1 in my other partition and unloading the Tables so I could see what was happening. I was delighted to find that the Import/Export feature of Access allows YMD, leading zero month and day, 4 digit year (as an option). So you can unload Access databases with full ISO8601 compliance. You have to manually select the options, but it can be done.
I was also pleased to find that if you give DbWeb an edit mask of %Y-%m-%d then it also works in full four digit year mode. Undocumented and manually entered, but Hey, it works.
I hear crunching. Rufus is eating his new plastic dish, so I must now attempt to take it away. I may be poor and underemployed but Life is never Boring.
Bye for now.